Way Too Soon

I learned something shocking today.  A guy I went to high school with just retired.
   I am not 65.  Nor is he.  Far, far, far from it, in fact.  Evidently he worked for a very long time for the phone company and got enough tenure to retire.  'Good for him,' I thought.  And then I thought some more, and that turned into 'I'm not so certain that's a good thing,' and then I thought some more and realized it's actually not only not a good thing, it's a bad thing.  A very bad thing.
   This guy has easily another 20 years on this Earth - assuming he doesn't take up snake handling or Russian roulette - and more probably has another 30 or 40 years ahead of him.  Essentially half his life is left.  And he's already retired.  Livin' the American dream.  Or more accurately the Greek dream, pulling a pension for the rest of his life without having to lift a finger.
   What's the problem? You might ask.  Well, I'll tell ya.
  Let's assume he doesn't get another job, which seems to be his plan.  Doing nothing but keeping Drew Carey company weekdays from 10-11 AM.*  Let's also assume his pension isn't a flat rate, but includes COLA increases.  That means he'll probably have exhausted everything he contributed within ten years, and for the remaining 10 or 20 or 30 he'll be living off the pension contributions of those people who are still employed.  He'll be the tip of the pyramid of an institutional Ponzi scheme.
  Sound familiar?  Like Social Security familiar?
  He'll be doing fine, presumably, but the people who come after him won't.  Eventually that pension fund will have to face the reality that it cannot meet its payout obligations because it never calculated that the participants would live for decades after retirement, or, indeed, that any of them would retire at 45.  There just isn't enough money.
  And when that pension fund goes insolvent and he can't collect SSI because that's also insolvent or he didn't contribute, who gets to foot the bill?  You and me.  We're funding his indolence.
   A first-time reader might assume from this post that I'm some kind of right-wing nut job, when nothing could be further from the truth.**  I'm so far left I even fence left-handed.  But I don't think anyone - ANYONE - should be collecting retirement income until they're of retirement age.  Which is 70.  Allowing people to suck from the pension teat any sooner destroys the basis for the whole system, which is the idea that most people will die before they retire.  Sounds harsh but it's true.  Neither pensions nor SSI were designed to pay people for decades.
   My grandfather retired at 40 from the US Air Force.  He joined when he was barely 18, at the height of the depression.  He went from that job right into a job with the Civil Service, which he kept for another 10 years, whereupon he retired a second time.  When he turned 62 he started to collect Social Security.  He was a triple-dipper, two retirement incomes and SSI.  'Good for him,' I thought...  After he retired - the second time - he lived another 20 years, and then after he died my grandmother collected a sizable fraction of his triple dips for another 14 years.  That's 35 years of having other people pay you not to work.
  The American dream?  Sure.  But it ain't right.

* when The Price Is Right airs

** seriously, go read some of my other stuff, the only reason I watch Fox is for COPS.  Oh, wait... that sounds kind of redneck too.  Uh... I listen to NPR regularly, how about that?